Posts by ThomH

Re: Two factor authentication or lockout as I call it.

Yeah, usually factor one = something you know, factor two = something you have. You need to know your username, password, other identifying information; you need to have a physical USB key, or the correct phone to receive a login code on, or a properly associated token generator. If your bank is like mine then login is one factor but adding a new account payee requires the second factor of a card reader and debit card.

Multiple pass-phrases is just an attempt to prevent you from using the same password as everywhere else, I'm guessing as I type, and entering the 3rd, 9th and 6th characters is probably a protection against key loggers?

Re: WTF?

Based on the article, I assume the question went something like this: "If an average fondleslab weighs 65kg then what quantum of REM statements if can be batched per processing hertz? Give your answer as an exact irrational number to two decimal places."

Re: Chromebooks

Per the quarterlies, Apple sells between 4 and 6 million Macs per quarter, usually bringing in about 10% of their revenue, total company revenue being in the $40–60bn range.

So although they're clearly a niche product, I don't think the vanity label holds water. Compare and contrast with the watch...

Re: Anyone with a Lumia

Indeed, the Nokia Lumia I own results from knowing that I'd be without a work phone for at least three months, having nothing else less than five years old, deciding to spend no more than $50 (without a contract), and deciding that if I'm buying whatever the network will sell me for $50 then I'd rather not have an Android because I know the network will have made the $50 Android into a piece of garbage. Conversely, Microsoft has the rules that all carrier-added applications must be uninstallable and that reskinning is not permitted, so all the network could do to my $50 Windows Phone was cost me a few minutes deleting AT&T-this and AT&T-that.

If I'd expected to have the phone for a year or more I'd probably have spent the then-price of $200 for the cheapest decent non-carrier-supplied unlocked Android. I guess it's even less now.

Re: Using "linkedin" as a password

I was in the process of saying exactly the same thing.

If you (i) don't consider it much of a loss if somebody else accesses your LinkedIn account; and (ii) don't want to share your LinkedIn password with any other site because LinkedIn passwords might leak; then something both unique to the site and easy to remember is ideal.

Mine are usually slightly better than that but I am definitely guilty of having very little regard for the quality of passwords that I use for sites which have no privileged information about me whatsoever. What's the worst that can happen here? Somebody might delete or graffiti my online CV? Not only do I have it in various other forms but I'm pretty sure I could reconstitute it from nothing with fairly limited effort. It's not particularly difficult to remember which university I went to and the list of my employers since then.

EDIT: hasty update on this, per the haveibeenpwned.com suggestion above, my LinkedIn password has leaked. So I guess I'll change it. But it's hard to feel a sense of urgency.

Re: Null pointers

I think they're politely not referencing competitors, to avoid lurid misrepresentations, but what they're describing sounds exactly like optionals in Ceylon or Swift, as also available in Java 8 and via Boost in C++ but in both cases being opt-in. If so then the semantics are fairly easy: any reference/pointer that may be null explicitly says so, and there's some sort of single-statement construct for dereferencing arbitrarily many in sequence or else getting some other result if any is null (depending on language possibly also optionally allowing an exception if any is null).

E.g. in no language in particular, result = dictionary[helper.getAdaptor().getProperty()].or(defaultValue)

...without having to test whether dictionary exists, then whether helper exists, then whether getAdaptor returns non-null, then whether getProperty returns non-null.

Re: thought process

He's technically a Republican Party reject; he failed to obtain the nomination so is running independently. It sounds like he may fail even to create a spoiler effect.

Re: Turned on at their discretion?

Why not? That's how the police incredibly successfully dealt with terrorism in the '70s — ask any of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven...

Re: uk recruiters

I think the 2008 recession ended in 2009, but then double dipped in 2011, which is when unemployment peaked. The country has had positive growth since 2013 and continuously declining unemployment figures since 2011. But possibly we're involved in a practical example of the difference between the formal technical definition of a recession and the average economic wellbeing, rendering the issue moot?

I'm also aware that:

* the pound has dropped substantially versus the dollar during the uncertainty about Brexit; and

* several large companies have sworn they'll leave the UK if the UK leaves the EU.

I therefore believe that if we left the UK then:

* the uncertainty would increase — who are we going to be able to agree new trade deals with, what will they say and when? — and therefore the pound would likely drop further; and

* at least some of those companies probably mean it.

Therefore I stand by my assessment that a Brexit would lead to a[nother] painful recession.

I'd have dared imagined that the split was:

* Leavers: the pain would be a temporary market reaction that would last only until Britain had re-established its links with the world, at which point it could become stronger because all applicable regulations and decisions would consider the needs of the UK only; versus

* Remainers: the pain would be part of a market correction that revalued the UK according to its worth if not part of a larger trade bloc; the UK would subsequently remain weakened because it would not be a member of any group with the soft power and negotiating weight to get good deals for it. Furthermore, 50% of trade is with the EU and the EU would likely seek to punish the UK for its departure as a symbolic gesture, therefore ties to the mainland would be negatively affected for at least a generation.

... not so much that anybody really thinks that leaving wouldn't cause at least immediate pain.

Re: Videos coming up next

I was looking for a Mysteron and then I found a Mysteron, and heaven knows I'm miserable now.

It could be, but with at least three different popular implementations, and with features agreed by the slow churn of a standards body rather than the late-night scribble of a product manager onto a napkin, problems should be more localised and more often foreseen.

You know, hopefully.

Hulu, I guess. Except that it's built right in to my TV, and is available for every streaming stick and box. So I don't really need the web site. But it is nevertheless a popular website under active development that seems still to be sticking with the olden days.

Re: Who did that? I see you at the back, Jones Minor...

It'd be nice if there were an intermediate option of running in a much stricter sandbox than normally allowed too, such as being permitted to remove network access permission from an app if it is no longer available. I can imagine the policy reasons for not offering that control generally — how many ad-supported games would be affected? — but if the app is withdrawn then the user should get a bump in control.

Re: I have a Mac at home that's a few years old

I considered a joke about the Mac Pro being a tube processor but decided against it; it'd just be a distraction from finally figuring out how on earth to tackle Repton 2.

Re: Logic & Gui

The Mac Office 2008, the first after Apple switched processors, shipped without support for VBA macros because the Mac version of that code was too PowerPC dependent; support wasn't reinstated until the next release, Office 2011. So in that case Microsoft had cleverly written two different versions of its interpreter and managed to tie each so closely to the CPU+OS combination that, even with two years' warning, it couldn't either change the CPU target for the one implementation or the OS target for the other.

So it's evidently not as simple as flipping a switch for Microsoft; I'd dare imagine they're not alone.

Re: Do what I've done

Researched; iOS 9 nags you to update to newer iOS 9s a lot more than pre-9 nags. That's probably the reason for the disparity in anecdotes.

That being said, "Apple are far worse for this kind of crap" is still patently false. Microsoft has sent the update as automatically approved, has promoted it from 'optional' to 'recommended' within its update classification system, offered prompts with only 'upgrade now' or 'upgrade later' as options, and has started prompting users whose administrators have used the official Microsoft tools to prevent that. And unlike iOS, Windows offers no official way to delete the update once it has been silently downloaded.

Hits for '"ios 9" nag': 77,200. Hits for '"windows 10" nag': 148,000.

Re: Why does Microsoft want this?

I think, officially, it's so that iOS apps can more easily be ported to Windows Phone and to mainline Windows. So frameworks like this are reproduced identically as they're just processing things, intended to allow work to get done. However Microsoft intends to provide distinct UI libraries that merely conform to an iOS coder's expectations on patterns and idioms. So you still end up writing a native Windows application, you just do it in a language and using a language binding that was not previously supported and which more easily facilitates conversion. You definitely don't just hit build and get some pretend-iOS sandbox that kind of connects to the Microsoft equivalents of some things in some places to some extent.

Re: Action Replay? You had it good! @Crisp

Maybe a Multiface would have been an easier option?

Re: yet to see a woman wearing one.

I wear a health band, this specific one's main contribution over everything my phone does already being continuous heart rate monitoring. Oh, and having the time on my wrist, obviously. Which is relevant to the lifestyle I aspire to; I'm sure a more psychologically robust person wouldn't be interested. But, regardless, the basic test is: what do I gain from having one that I would not otherwise have? Avoiding having to reach all the way into my pocket for my phone is not sufficient.

(EDITed addition: the Apple Watch isn't especially close to continuously monitoring, it samples every ten minutes; judged according to the things it does that my phone does not already, battery life is far too poor and it's far too expensive)

Re: IE must die

An Edge fan?

Re: Shortage of new product

Or it's because the cost of matching the production curve to the demand curve would be greater than the cost of a shortage. Even more so if you think that a shortage generates sales rather than restricting them, but possible regardless.

Ramping production up and down is expensive. Apple products tend to launch big but then remain available for at least a year as the only thing in that market segment. Both of which are atypical.

Other devices don't tend to do the same blockbuster opening weeks because they have more similar competition and, usually, get supplanted more quickly — other companies, including those that sell many more devices overall, offer more choice and launch products more frequently.

Re: Where's debs?

It's on GitHub. For Swift Apple seems to be using the public repository for the mainline development branch. It's not a case of developing somewhere else and then publishing.

Re: The same memory as the BBC Micro Model A of 15 years ago...

Pedantry attack!

Peter Ford: the lower half is Mode 5. Mode 6 is Mode 4 with the two blank lines between every character column; Mode 5 was 2bpp, 160 pixels across. Mode 6 is, like 4, 1bpp and 320 pixels across but only 25 8-line character rows high, spread over 250 display lines.

With no VIA and the mid-frame real-time clock interrupt not being conveniently placed, the Electron version of Elite is just Mode 4 for the entire display.

After Elite, I'll have Starship Command, please.

Re: hubris

My understanding is that, discovering that the book publishers were unhappy with being unable to control Amazon's pricing, Apple spoke to all at once — effectively mediating a group discussion — so as to propose the agency model (i.e. publishers set the price, Apple just takes its 30%), and that all the publishers then simultaneously demanded the agency model from Amazon. Since they wanted to switch to the agency model in order to increase prices, Apple had facilitated a group with a monopoly over the market to try to manipulate pricing in their favour.

All of which Apple appears to accept, except they say that they did it for the benefit of the market — that grabbing some power back from Amazon reduces the main monopoly seller, rather than artificially empowering the monopoly producers.

As a consumer, I'd rate that as hubris indeed. Supposedly competing parties acted together. So as to increase prices. How askew would the world need to be for that not to be a breach of anti-trust law?

That plus the precedent it would set — the government doesn't need a master key if it can take each individual phone to its OS vendor and compel them to create and install an appropriately version-matched copy, modified as desired. It's one now; next year it'll be a handful; the year after that a couple of dozen...

Re: Anyone remember the Atari Lynx?

The 6502 in an Atari Lynx is a 65SC02 and, being clocked at 4Mhz, is probably roughly twice as fast the Z80 in the Spectrum. But it doesn't need to be because the unlike pre-+2A Spectrums the Lynx has a double buffer, and unlike all of its contemporaries it has a scaling hardware blitter with some basic vector drawing capabilities and a maths coprocessor for multiply and divide. It has to surrender the bus for the former but can run in parallel with the latter.

These are some of the benefits a machine can accrue by being launched seven years later.

But the Spectrum games are better.

I think the opposite is more likely; Apple created and gave OpenCL to Khronos back in 2009 so probably still has a good relationship with them, and has its high-level SceneKit and SpriteKit as proprietary APIs up where most developers now hang out.

I think the only market advantage Apple derives from Metal is that cross-platform fare sitting atop Unreal or Unity or whatever runs better on its hardware than on a hypothetical clock-for-clock equivalent alternative.

If Vulkan offers the same advantages of Metal then I would expect Apple to adopt the two as equals (hedging against Vulkan falling behind, naturally).

Re: Old portable kit ...

All the benefits in productivity afforded by kilo-or-so computers with large, high-quality displays, plentiful storage and trivial networking have been eaten by email, Facebook and Wikipedia.

The Virgin 747s running from San Francisco to Heathrow still have 15 or 20 economy seats upstairs; it's well-worth getting one if you can. Quite apart from being quieter, window seats get a little shelf and, of course, you walk straight down to the exit, allowing you to get into the border control queue a couple of hundred people earlier than you otherwise might have done.

Re: Prosecution required.

Negligence = duty + beach + damage. Someone can sue as soon as they suffer damage. Which, even with the probable quality-of-lawyer differential, is still better protection than '90s-era HTTPS.

Re: Hmm 1997!

That's £2,180.34 in today's money to save everybody else the effort.

Re: Who is presenting? @AC

The second rule of Robot Club is... no smoking?

Re: Just give me a frikking keyboard!

I'm more interested in the return of the trackball (or equivalent), which I last saw on a Nexus One. I find that typing on a screen is a much smaller problem than trying to position the cursor. It's almost always just easier to delete and retype than to try to edit when performing basic phone tasks like messaging. I seem to be better on iOS than Android but that's probably only subjective practice.

@boltar Re: Change the record

I think it's more the case that: (i) Flash massively overreached on features, going a long way beyond animation and video, and managed only relatively poor hardware acceleration, especially away from Windows; and (ii) such exploits in HTML5 delivery code as will be found will likely be limited to specific combinations of browser and OS. So they'll be smaller in scope and therefore easier to avoid.

Its death is also appealing because it eliminates redundancy — why should my browser have two separate scripting engines, one for JavaScript and one for a weird proprietary off-shoot of JavaScript? — and given that all the major OS vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Google) provide a browser, it puts the people who expose the available hardware acceleration and who debug the OS under the same umbrella as some of the people responsible for an implementation the web standards. We shouldn't again go through "Apple doesn't expose the hardware acceleration" "Yes we do, you don't use it" "That's because you expose it in a stupid fashion", etc, or "A third of reported crashes on the Mac are Flash" "Oh, well, Macs must be broken then". Which are both Apple examples but, you know, cuts to the point that a centralised, single-vendor implementation of an essential standard is undesirable in a world of diverse clients.

Re: What a corker!

There was a 'Next Week...' trailer; after there was also a very minor post-credits sequence that was just about tying up that episode. I don't think you're missing any important plot points — it was highly skippable — but if you want an excuse to skip back after next week then there it is.